This was a 40-year revenge story. What a wild ride. The Dream Park is a nice idea for losing weight. ( )

So far, doesn't appear as tightly introduced as the first book in the series, but that may simply be because the first book was so concerned with meticulous construction of world. ( )

Dreamworld game real murder cooporate takeover plot foiled

As Niven and Barnes describe it in the afterward, The Barsoom Project is Fantasy wrapped in Sci-Fi wrapped in a Mystery - just like the original Dream Park novel. Unfortunately, I found this one to be less interesting and less engaging than the original. Perhaps leaving Alex Griffin on the outside of the game meant that there were too many threads to keep track of. Maybe it was the Inuit mythos coupled with the Lovecraftian Cthulu-type enemies. Maybe it was the fact that we were in a Fat-ripper game. Maybe it was Evianne's continued self-questioning everytime someone said, "It's just a game." It just seemed slow and forced. The unmasking of the plant happened too close to the end, and then the plant just disappeared. Actually, all of the final resolutions seemed to have just been vomited out in the last five pages as if somebody said, "We're already written 400 pages, but we still need another 150 to tidy everything up nicely... Nah... we'll just wrap this up in five pages and call it good." ( )

This books is a follow-on to Dream Park. In this, the Dream Park business is running a new simulation, an end-of-the world scenario with mythological connections. But things are going on behind the scenes. When a player dies before it should be possible, an investigation begins turning up murder and conspiracy - and a return character operating under an alias and with a hidden past.

The dream story is interesting. It was well-researched and involves some Inuit history and mythology, and we see the players drawn into an interesting culture.

However, I didn't feel the story was as good as the previous one. The characters are a bit shallow, which is moderately typical for Niven. But the story is very creative, which is also typical. In the end, I didn't feel as if everything was adequately explained, such as the code modifications which had to get around security and have a very good understanding of their technology. The mystery player seemed to be far to uninteresting in the end, she had a lot of potential and should have been more complex. With the weak ending and the lack of character development I can't recommend this book. ( )